Humanities on the Edge

A speaker series to promote cutting edge cross-disciplinary conversations in the Humanities So what is this edge that the humanities appear to be teetering on?

“Humanities on the Edge”:
A Manifesto

The metaphor of our title evokes the ambiguity of liminal spaces and transitional periods. It locates its subject, the “humanities,” in a precarious position between its revered past and its vague future possibilities. It suggests that we have reached a historical turning point, and the hour has arrived when we must assume full responsibility for the directi

on of our futures. Our title, thus, speaks of a precarious balance that might be disturbed by the slightest movement of the air, by the smallest trembling of the ground, and even by the barely perceptible tremors of the human body. It names a moment of risk, when the urgency of action tightens our muscles and confounds our minds with the unbearable burden of a decision. Few things would be more self-evident today than to assume that it is the edge of an abyss that threatens to swallow up everything that we have held so dear for so long. For quite some time now, we have been conditioned to take for granted the rhetoric of crisis that has invaded every publicly available discourse. This is the edge that we live on today: the perpetual state of mobilization that has become the very medium of our existence. In fact, this perpetual crisis is more than mere rhetoric: it is the very means of the active reorganization of both human and non-human life through the reconfiguration of the institutions that give shape to our worlds. But if there is more to our lives than the melancholy resignation to this apocalyptic diagnosis, there is still hope that this edge is also the edge of a new beginning. For what else could be the inverse of this perpetual crisis if not the “perpetual revolution” of a field that must assume the responsibility of constantly reinventing itself. Since the term “the humanities” names a particular form of knowledge that the human being uses to understand itself, the very indeterminacy and openness of the object (the human being) must be clearly reflected in the discourses that try to describe it. This is then the edge that our title refers to: it is the link that simultaneously separates and joins together the dystopia of perpetual crisis and the utopia of perpetual invention. Our objective with the speaker series is to bring to UNL the kind of cutting edge research in the humanities that promises to define the future of critical thought for some time to come. We plan to invite speakers from across the Humanities disciplines whose works have repeatedly forced us to rethink some of the most basic terms that we use to understand ourselves. We would like to turn this speaker series into a recurring event with a special central topic for each academic year. Roland Végsö
Marco Abel

All events are free of charge and open to the public.

03/03/2026

Against Affect - Nebraska Press Against Affect interrogates shibboleths of feeling and reason and their relationship with ideas of identity, gender, and freedom in the twenty-first century....

11/13/2025

Today's the day: Our 2nd event this fall is upon us.

Please remember that it will be via ZOOM, *not* at the Sheldon Museum of Art.
November 13, 5:30pm CST, via Zoom https://unl.zoom.us/j/95546779211
(The UNL Art History department will host an in-person Zoom screening in Richards Hall 14.)

"Whatever I Tell You I'm Going To Do Is Never Going To Happen -- So Trans Out, Bro” : A Conversation with Sandy Stone and Marji Vecchio

Media artist Sandy Stone has established herself as one of the most prominent trans* theorists of our time. Her essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranss*xual Manifesto,” contributed to the founding of transgender studies programs in academia. As a founding sound engineer for Olivia Records, a feminist music label, she charted a path for trans* feminists in new media from the 1970s to today.

Stone is the subject of the upcoming documentary *Girl Island: The Sandy Stone Story*, which features animation by award-winning graphic novel artist Bishkah Som. In our Zoom event with her, she will discuss the film with director Marji Vecchio.

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

11/11/2025

Tick, tick, tick.... Just two days till our 2nd event this fall. Please remember that it will be via ZOOM, *not* at the Sheldon Museum of Art.

November 13, 5:30pm CST, via Zoom https://unl.zoom.us/j/95546779211
(The UNL Art History department will host an in-person Zoom screening in Richards Hall 14.)

"Whatever I Tell You I'm Going To Do Is Never Going To Happen -- So Trans Out, Bro” : A Conversation with Sandy Stone and Marji Vecchio

Media artist Sandy Stone has established herself as one of the most prominent trans* theorists of our time. Her essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranss*xual Manifesto,” contributed to the founding of transgender studies programs in academia. As a founding sound engineer for Olivia Records, a feminist music label, she charted a path for trans* feminists in new media from the 1970s to today.

Stone is the subject of the upcoming documentary *Girl Island: The Sandy Stone Story*, which features animation by award-winning graphic novel artist Bishkah Som. In our Zoom event with her, she will discuss the film with director Marji Vecchio.

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

11/07/2025

Please remember that our second event this fall will be via ZOOM, *not* at the Sheldon Museum of Art (this is a change to previous advertisement and info on our e-poster).

November 13, 5:30pm CST, via Zoom https://unl.zoom.us/j/95546779211 (The UNL Art History department will host an in-person Zoom screening in Richards Hall 14.)

"Whatever I Tell You I'm Going To Do Is Never Going To Happen -- So Trans Out, Bro” : A Conversation with Sandy Stone and Marji Vecchio

Media artist Sandy Stone has established herself as one of the most prominent trans* theorists of our time. Her essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranss*xual Manifesto,” contributed to the founding of transgender studies programs in academia. As a founding sound engineer for Olivia Records, a feminist music label, she charted a path for trans* feminists in new media from the 1970s to today.

Stone is the subject of the upcoming documentary *Girl Island: The Sandy Stone Story*, which features animation by award-winning graphic novel artist Bishkah Som. In our Zoom event with her, she will discuss the film with director Marji Vecchio.

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

10/29/2025

Our second event this fall will be via ZOOM, *not* at the Sheldon Museum of Art (this is a change to previous advertisement).

November 13, 5:30pm CST, via Zoom (https://unl.zoom.us/j/95546779211)

"Whatever I Tell You I'm Going To Do Is Never Going To Happen -- So Trans Out, Bro” : A Conversation with Sandy Stone and Marji Vecchio

Media artist Sandy Stone has established herself as one of the most prominent trans* theorists of our time. Her essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranss*xual Manifesto,” contributed to the founding of transgender studies programs in academia. As a founding sound engineer for Olivia Records, a feminist music label, she charted a path for trans* feminists in new media from the 1970s to today.

Stone is the subject of the upcoming documentary *Girl Island: The Sandy Stone Story*, which features animation by award-winning graphic novel artist Bishkah Som. In our Zoom event with her, she will discuss the film with director Marji Vecchio.

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

10/04/2025

Check out this new PROVOCATIONS book by Steven Swarbrick. THE EARTH IS EVIL "is a vigorous attempt to construct a leftist environmental movement in dialogue with the most radical currents of critical theory."

"The reigning ideology of ecocriticism can be summed up in a well-known phrase by the novelist E.M. Forster: “Only connect!” Interconnection is the buzzword of ecocriticism, as are terms like entanglement and mesh. From massively interconnected hyperobjects to actor-networks to rhizomatic agencies, ecocriticism is enthralled by metaphors of interconnection. The reason is simple. Interconnectedness offers an alternative to the top-down models of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other forms of ideology critique. The problem with this ecological refrain, “Only connect,” is that it is fully of a piece with capitalist logic. We are never more enmeshed in capitalist thinking than when we believe ourselves to be one with the web of life. That this is now the doxa of environmental theory is troubling to say the least. To say the least, it is troubling that this logic has become the doxa of environmental theory.” (from Preface)

09/30/2025

This is very much a humanities book that's "on the edge"

"A timely intervention in the field of environmental humanities, THE EARTH IS EVIL offers a new way of apprehending the ongoing ecological catastrophe. Instead of melancholic yearning for the lost wholeness of the living world, Steven Swarbrick suggests that we fully recognize loss. His use of film enables him to offer a genuine psychoanalysis of the Anthropocene, an eco-analysis of our troubles collective psyche." (Fréderic Neyrat)

The book (University of Nebraska Press is out now. It's a great read and should be of interested to folks in film studies as well as environmental studies, psychoanalysis, and, more broadly, critical theory.

09/03/2025

We're looking forward to commencing out 16th season during which we'll focus on "Trans* Ecologies." First up:

Thursday, September 18, 2025, Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professors of Women, Gender, and S*xuality Studies, U Kansas), "S*x, Science, and Forms of Defiance," at the Sheldon Museum of Art

Lecture Abstract:
Artists' interventions often help understand how we are made and unmade by disciplines like psychiatry, s*xology, anthropology, and reproductive medicine. Anchored in a curatorial exploration of the recent exhibition Scientia S*xualis, this talk considers alternative access points to the history of science where s*x, gender, and pleasure are concerned. Works that address and hold diverse political and historical situations in their forms and textures are grounded in archives mapping often painful histories, including trans, Black feminist, Indigenous, disabled, and q***r tactics of survival.

Bio Bio Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar and curator of contemporary art and public practice. Her writing and social practice trace the idiosyncrasy of the archive to activate liberation histories and coalitions. Jeanne’s book in process, Handmade: feelings and textures of transgender, considers the felt l...

08/05/2025

Thinking With... A Rhetorical Theory Podcast Philosophy Podcast · Updated Weekly · “Thinking With..." is a pedagogical experiment that serves as an invitation to think along with the text, with us, and with each other. We are three academics who specialize in Rhetorical Theory: Nate…

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Humanities on the Edge

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